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Wambat is holding a weekly raffle giveaway of Steam games to promote the Fourth Age Total War mod and his Let's Play campaign!

First Impressions

Zero Hour + 1:05 here.

Unpacking the pre-load and updating took a little while but not too bad considering lots of people must have been doing the same. I had 37 Gb free on my SSD before preload, which went down to 9 Gb during the uncompressing before ending up with 19 Gb free. So you will need at least 28 Gb free space for the install but once done it uses up 18 Gb.

My Greek states DLC validation code hasn't arrived from Amazon UK yet (some people have been emailed it already IIRC?) so for now I'm without it. Minor annoyance.

I lasted about 30 mins of the Prologue. It was heavily scripted for newbies which is great but I'm ready for the main campaign now. Two immediate worries in the Prologue: I wanted to use Hastatii to attack some slingers who strayed too close but didn't want to waste their pila on such unimportant enemies. But there wasn't any button I could see to turn off fire-at-will for the pila - as soon as I selected then right-mouse-clicked on the slingers the Hastatii threw a volley of pila before attacking. A loss of control for the player unless I have missed something.

And even more worrying: with units selected there was a button in the bottom left of the screen which displayed this tooltip: "Toggle Cinematic Mode: This produces a small combat boost when turned on" or something similar. WHAT??! Pray to Zeus that this is either a mistake or just a prologue-only bit of nonsense.

Re: First Impressions

An hour left depending on the download rate for me. I hope to enjoy this, favourite of all time has to be the first MTW, the one that got me hooked onto the franchise in the first place, a game which I can no longer play sadly thanks to the infamous bugs.

Re: First Impressions

First impressions without spoilers (my favorite in series is ME2, Shogun 2 was disappointing for me, unit variety meant I spent 10x more time playing ME2 since S2 release)

- Its quite a lot faster that ME2 and S2. The units feel like they are moving at the right pace relative to their size – kewl
- Its beautiful. I like the texturing/ contouring of the terrain
- The momentum thing is ace, if you hit a unit in the side with v heavy infantry you can see them impact and distort the unit shape
- I like the indicators above the flags for morale up or hidden etc
- The tree hiding thing – I must learn to exploit this asap
- when I set up and heard "sons of mars" there was a tingle down my spine

My plan - get a med/med campaign done and then play as the brits... thats right, I am British and blue crazy people appeal to me.
booked 2 days of at the end of the week - abandoning wife and child and moving to mates house for some coop - will keep you posted

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Re: First Impressions

Played it for about 4 hours so far....when I arrived at the main menu and saw the "Prologue campaign" option, I just ignored it. While some hand-holding is nice, I just wanted to get to the meat of it right away.

I notice a ton of complaints about the AI but I have yet to see any real issues...in fact the only real big issue I noticed is that the AI seems to be too static when defending and can generally be "bled" to death by skirmish/missile fire.

Just so everyone knows (though you may already, I know I didn't) a faction is not destroyed until all its army's and cities are all gone. I thought I would do something sneaky and take Pahavae's(?) last city to stop his doomstack from attacking my weaker/poorer/not walled city but he still went and sacked it anyway.

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Re: First Impressions

Originally Posted by Lemur

It's installed and unlocked ... and now I need to work a nine-hour day with lots of deadlines. Grrrrr. That's my first impression: Grrrrrr.

I'm in the same boat, only I booted it up, looked at the civs available (and their perks/disabilities), and loaded a game as Rome. Of course I didn't have time to do anything, but did notice that the Escape key does not bring up the menu. Hopefully this doesn't lead to more concerns.

AI wise nothing particularly bad playing Custom Battles, tends to hang back & wait for you to do something though -> will probably cause plenty 'unresponsive AI' complaints.
It does tend to suddenly react once you do something to break its torpor eg moving a unit to an obviously vulnerable spot.
Maybe if I checked to make sure AI or me was attacking...

Got my ass whipped in Naval battle.

Land battles have been a bit weird, partly because I tried mostly to get a variety of units to oggle rather than going for useful army makeup but once engaged I seemed to be on the down early, turn the tide & think I'm in mop up mode for an easy win, then suddenly half my troops are dead/routing & it turns into a big struggle to come away with a few severely depleted units.
Might just be I haven't actually played much TW for a long time

Some UI glitches eg units not responding to attack commands (I think if group members rout?), sometimes units sticking in drag & drop mode when I tried to click a move order.

Some unit movement issues.
I always have used 'g' grouping eg for left flank cav, left flank infantry, main line infantry, skirmishers, missile, right flank infantry, right flank cav each group with manually set order & depth/width.
Can select one of these groups then drag & drop into new position -> keeps unit order & width settings.

In Rome2 the default 'g' group won't keep your unit order & width settings.
There is new 'ctrl + g' aka locked group function which works similar to the old style & isn't too much of an issue to use.

But you used to be able to select multiple 'g' groups & click a move order & they would move in formation, not anymore. Now it makes a big line formation with all your groups, not nice.
I think I saw reference to something like a shift click to do that but haven't seemed to find it in controls or found what does it.

However you can use Up arrow to advance the formation (moves the destination shadow forward), may actually be almost more useful.
Left/Right buttons traverse sideways & ctrl (or shift) left/right rotates.

So when I first did a battle, I setup my 'g' groups as usual, adjusted the layout & discovered the units were out of order
Re-ordered & discovered the locked groups by accident -> setup with locked groups then select all & move what the crap is this?
Some studying of the controls screen found the arrows stuff, not really happy with that as a longterm solution though.

I like the in battle LoS system

Performance wise: I have an Phenom2 x6 1055T (fairly overclocked), 4GB ram & Radeon 6950 running 2560*1600 on 30inch monitor.
Game runs mostly OK with Ultra settings, though I'm tolerant of pretty low fps in relatively slow games, getting 15-20fps typical so far with that.
Graphics settings screen has a nicely placed link to benchmark run, though you have to save away & back to actually have setting changes applied.
Everything on min except unit size it only hit about 45fps which is fine, this is no Unreal engine where higher fps lets you jump further.
Seems to use plenty of my multi-core capacity.
Edit: runs nearly 20fps average on Extreme with a couple of tweaks windowed at 1920*1600

Did a land battle on Carthage tile, it was inland & the inland side of Carthage was a disappointment.
No big walls & they didn't even put houses on the inland side of the Bursa, has trees up there
Also my PC tanked when trying to draw Carthage off in the distance.

Fortunately I've been looking for an excuse to get a newer GPU & new generation Radeons are due shortly so the 79xx are getting cheaper &/or there will be a performance leap for similar price.

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Re: First Impressions

Hello all. Turned on the game this morning because I was tired and couldn't do a midnight play like I wanted :(

Units sometimes don't respond to commands. I lost a battle because I was clicking units to reinforce a fight and they never moved. :( Also trying to move units brought up the placement alignment graphic and they didn't move when I clicked.

My hope is this is one of two things: I am an idiot who isn't used to the new interface or this is a bug that will get patched soon.

Also the units move must faster than the last TW game I played (Medieval 2). Gonna take a bit to get used to this new style. Still need to figure out the House ins and outs. Been a long time since I played Rome I.

Re: First Impressions

Is that just me or you cant kill faction's navy after you destroyed every of their cities? i tried to kill all the units, ram it, burn it, nothing works. it says victory but on the campaign map it's still there with 26 people, next turn he comes back for me with 26 damn people, i'm tired of killing it 20 turns in a row.

Re: First Impressions

I finally got to play the game for about 45 minutes this morning before heading to work. I skipped the prologue, started a campaign as Epirus, and spent my limited time getting familiar with the campaign map. Having played RTW, M2TW, and Shogun 2, this game's interface seems the least intuitive by far, but I'm sure I'll get used to quickly. One thing I haven't figured out is how armies interact with navies. After realizing I couldn't make my land units board my navy units, I realized that they could magically conjure their own fleets... which can't be merged with the permanent naval units. I don't get that. Can anyone shed some light on this new function?

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Re: First Impressions

Pretty buggy right now, units moonwalking often (or just gliding with no walk animation) and poor and inconsistent collision detection. Charging units often 'meld' into one another several ranks deep before being 'reset' back out to where they should be. Sarissa from the 2nd rank in a phalanx poke right through the shields of the front rank. 'Pikemen' going into battle with swords drawn unless placed in phalanx.

Also, special abilities like intimidation seem very inconsistent right now. Units that are even or sometimes winning will break for seemingly no reason when fighting a unit that has this ability.

After unit cohesion breaks down (which happens a bit too often to 'disciplined' units) and men start to wander, they often stand around looking at each other. AI still gets confused and commits highly questionable acts of suicide. Had a group of AI Suebian Berserkers break ranks and charge my flank-screening Royal Parthian Cataphracts in the open field from quite a far distance while my force advanced on the Suebian line in a Custom Battle. They were almost completely annihilated in one charge.

Perhaps my biggest disappointment right now though came during a Custom Battle pitting Athens vs Epirus, where my advancing hoplites were rained on by flaming javelins from the Epirote peltasts. Flaming javelins people, you read it right. What's next CA, magic spells?!

So tired of nonsense...

One note, tested some of the hero units like Heroes of Sparta, Berserkers, etc. and found that they were nowhere near as OP as they were in RTW in terms of resistance to damage.

Also, I'm playing it on a 9600GT 1Gb with the latest drivers (modest card for sure) and the shadows even on 'High' are horrendous (V.High or Ultra wouldn't be feasible). If you rotate the camera around to the shaded side of a unit even with the Sun high up, the units turn into dark silhouettes with little to no detail. Wanted to point that out in case there are others out there waiting to play it on older hardware.

Re: First Impressions

It seems the civilized bias is back again...

I(Macedonia) attacked the Triballi with 800 men while they were defending Navissos with 3600. I had with me the companion general, 4 hoplites, 2 slingers and 2 skirmishers. I lost my general early on, but still I was able to win with 300 left while they lost 3000. C'mon, this can't be my good generalship.

rickinator9 is either a cleverly "hidden in plain sight by jumping on the random bandwagon" scum or the ever-increasing in popularity "What the is going on?" townie. Either way I want to lynch him. - White Eyes

Re: First Impressions

Tried it a bit on my brothers PC. A few notes...

I love the look of barbarian units, but I think the faction rosters are not very varied.
There seems to be a visual bug in snowy battles, since the snowy layer isn't attached properly to the shield, meaning the shield pattern flickers through the snow whenever the shield is moved.
Battles seem to be over far too quickly. But maybe I am just to used to mods.
Why do several enemy armies appear when I attack a city, even when only one is shown as garrisoned?
Why are regular Hoplites better than Spartan Hoplites?

Re: First Impressions

OK - I am up and running now and after the d/l and verification I've had no issues. Playing around w/ settings as I get a lot of shimmer - and that is bad - AMD 6900 series here.

I've seen a lot of what Capt. Crunch has seen but not to a huge game breaking extent. I guess it doesn't bother me as much as some others. I can tell you that the Roman's are bloody supermen IMO.

Anyway, if I can get the shimmers sorted I will feel OK. Oh and that day one patch? I read over on TWC * that that may have been delayed as CA is promising another patch in a week. So either there was no day 1 patch or they are promising yet another.

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Re: First Impressions

Just finished the prologue. Looked around the encyclopedia and it was a pain in the ass to navigate. Not to mention that scrolling and selecting is sluggish.

There are no more short, long and domination campaigns. Instead, there are three victory conditions which differ by faction.

I think I'm going to pick Carthage. The initial position is pretty rough, since I don't control any provinces. Carthage's 4 territories are all in different provinces. That's probably why it's rated as hard.

Re: First Impressions

I've solely completed the prologue campaign so far. First impressions are excellent. Firstly, my experience wasn't adversely affected by bugs at all, though I did witness some minor glitches. Performance is excellent, much to my surprise - at least as good as Shogun 2.

The units and combat both feel really good - skirmishers are worthy of inclusion, as are the siege weapons, but the fun really starts when your Hastati hit home. BOOM!

Really, it feels a lot like Shogun 2, but with a different setting, more focus on open battle, and nicer combat.

Re: First Impressions

The encyclopdia is a bit stupid to use but the game is fun so far. Just been playing lots of Coop campaign and except for the occasional OOS, it's good fun. Better than Shogun 2 with all the diversity and stuff.

Re: First Impressions

After playing through the Prologue, going 12 years into a campaign, and having run dozens and dozens of Custom Battles, here are some thoughts;

For me the battles have been particularly unsatisfying. As has been stated many times, the pace is absurd, they're over in minutes... but I expected this from the pre-release info. However it happens even when you setup really evenly matched battles. Even though they attempted to create a sense of mass and weight among the units, the fact that they just melt into one another during charges, and then often outright disappear from the scrum really nullifies any sense of 'solidness' among the soldiers. The collision detection is just extraordinarily weak at the moment... but not always! This is part of the inconsistency with the graphics/physics that I've experienced throughout the game so far.

If enough men encircle an opposing unit, that unit literally melts away into oblivion without a trace sometimes. I see soldiers standing inside one another, there can be 3 entire units standing in the same place all mashed up and you can't tell sometimes (especially if you have banners and selection rings disabled). When you mouse over them to see what the hell is going on, the game often gives you the wrong info about the unit ID.

Aesthetically, I feel the look of the game is several orders of magnitude inferior to what we were shown during the pre-release screens and vids. Even though I'm not playing with everything maxed, I am running just about everything on 'high' or 'very high', with unit details and textures set to 'ultra'. Shadows is where I had to take a significant hit where I had to set it to 'High' to get playable frames, but I'm not sure that's reason enough for me to not be able to see any unit details when I position the camera opposite the sun! Everybody on the battlefield turns into a night shade and it's really difficult to see what's going on or get any enjoyment out of the battle animations. I've also played a small scale battle (aren't they all? ) with everything maxed out just to see the difference and I can't really notice one except in the sky and for the water.

Also, my experience with disabling missile trails has so far been to hardly see missiles at all until they just appear stuck in the targeted units. Of course, on better systems I'm sure the appearance of the game is most certainly improved... but by how much? Out of curiosity, I checked out the R2 forum over at TWCenter and saw quite a few threads containing endless complaints about the graphics from players with top-of-the-line machines. I'm no graphics monger believe me, but right now there is very little crispness or definition to the look of the game. You don't have to zoom out very much before you can no longer tell what unit you're looking at, unless it's one that's really distinctive. This might sound nuts to some, but right now in its current state, I much prefer the look of RTW with EB set to max than this. Yeah the models are inferior and there are so many less polys and so forth, but the look is defined and the feel is 'solid'.

The icing on the shitcake for me today though was to discover that not only are there things such as flaming javelins in the game, but also HAs with flaming arrows and skirmisher cav with flaming magic as well.

Really CA... what were you thinking?

I can honestly say that there hasn't been a single aspect of the game I've been able to get excited about... and I'm really trying to. I mean I knew I'd be disappointed about a number of things, and I'm not trying to give the impression that there is nothing I like about the game. However, I really didn't expect this level of dissatisfaction, or the indifference I'm feeling towards it. Damn shame...

Re: First Impressions

I skipped the prologue, finally played a few turns as Rome. Still trying to wrap my head around the new mechanics: What's with the family politics? I can't make head or tail of it. Not quite as underdeveloped as, say, the railroad transport menu in FotS, but I'm still puzzled by it. Replacing generals is really weird as well, apparently you can't swap 'em or move 'em between armies and navies ... I guess you're stuck with them? And the 4 random "replacements" you are allowed to look at?

Trade at least makes sense, and the diplomacy includes welcome feedback.

I dunno, going to have to dig in for a while and get a handle on the interface and systems.

-edit-

Obviously, I'm not doing any proper battles yet, just trying to get a sense of the campaign tools/interface. And flailing about a great deal.

Last edited by Lemur; 09-04-2013 at 03:00.

"Those are my principles, and if you don't like them ... well, I have others." — Groucho Marx

Re: First Impressions

Still remember my greatest MTW moments as if they were yesterday, that campaign where I saved the Byzantine's butts countless times as Denmark, my epic crusade battle that came down to the Egyptian sultan and heir to the English throne as the last two men on the battlefield, my first taste of the Mongols as the leader of my little English crusader state became "The Butcher".

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Re: First Impressions

Originally Posted by johnhughthom

Still remember my greatest MTW moments as if they were yesterday, that campaign where I saved the Byzantine's butts countless times as Denmark, my epic crusade battle that came down to the Egyptian sultan and heir to the English throne as the last two men on the battlefield, my first taste of the Mongols as the leader of my little English crusader state became "The Butcher".

Nothing has come close with the recent titles.

This is going OT, but I could not agree more, IMO Medieval 1 was the pinnacle of the series and none of the others have come anywhere near it. I know that the switch to the 3D map essentially broke the strategic AI, as it just doesn't know how to cope with all of the options/movement, but what amazes me most is that Medieval 1 (and Shogun 1 I think, I never really played it) had an honest to goodness, functional Battle AI. Not a brilliant one, but one that knew how to use units to their strengths, maintain and move armies in formation, run off to hills to defend- that sort of thing. A good player still won often but you actually had to TRY, and even battles where the AI had better units than yours could be really scary. I still play a lot of M1 to this day, so I don't think this is just me rambling nostalgically- my 1st time back to M1 (after several years of an nvidia card that wouldn't run it), the computer HAMMERED me in an even battle, simply because I went into it hardly paying attention and apparently had become soft from being used to the RTW and beyond AI performance.

It's as if they just removed any battle AI programming for Rome 1, and left it out in the subsequent sequels (thankfully modding helps with this to some degree).

- As a side note, on a win 7 pc with AMD card, Medieval 1 now runs just fine for me.

Re: First Impressions

h-h-here i go

tl:dr version included.

The graphics glitches are a real headscratcher.

Turned up to extreme the game looks awful on my setup, and my PC is no busta. It's not a lag issue, it's a render issue, and I'm not sure what's up. Maybe video drivers need to be updated? Would have thought this kind of thing would be sorted for a game that got this much hype, and looked as good as it did in the press videos. For me it looks absolutely hideous.. I'm not far from hyperbole when I say the terrain set on extreme looks almost identical to the Original RTW for me. There is something seriously wrong with that and I'm saddened that the game is released looking as bad as it does, optimized as poorly as it is.

The technology tree is something I don't see nearly enough people talking about. There's nothing to it at all. You can blitz to Post-Marian reforms legionaries in 10 turns. 15 if you count building time.

What? I understand wanting people to have iconic legionaries but.. what? The transition feels completely pointless, and if anything, is a huge missed opportunity. It would have been much better to do an event like the legendary swordsman in the original STW (maybe a defeat causes Rome to rethink its military, etc) or just a plain event trigger like conquering a set number of provinces, giving the player the choice to reorganize the military to be more mobile/efficient ( Marius' Mules).

The new provincial system is needlessly punishing I think. Sacking and looting a city now effects all cities in that province, even if they are your home cities. Rome starts at war with the Etruscan League so naturally they are enemies of Rome. I kill my enemies. I defeat their armies. Crush their resistance and loot their cities.. but by looting their cities, my capital in Rome takes a happiness hit. Why? Rome should be celebrating! I just nailed the enemy commander to a cross and took his woman before his corpse was cold. I'm a hero! Why on earth would that upset Rome?

Provinces now share happiness, so what happens to one city affects the happiness of the region. Okay, i get that. It's an interesting mechanic and is probably meant to have two goals. One of which is getting armies to stop camping castles/cities which i hugely approve of, and the other to upset neighboring cities and make them more likely to attack you from your expansion. I take Sparta and loot it, causing nearby Athens to grow extremely worried and suffer happiness hits as war looms on their neighboring provinces. But the ability to cause "friendly fire" by natural expansion is rather puzzling. The problem comes in the fact that sacking and looting enemies of Rome is now causing riots in the streets of Rome. This is, unfortunately, not a logical balance system. When i first heard about this system I naturally assumed that friendly fire would not be possible but it looks like I was severely mistaken.

I really like the new recruiting system. It feels like a natural evolution of the way armies work and I wish we had this all the way back in medieval 2. The Army naming is really fun too - I sincerely enjoy any game that allows me to add some customization to my troops. I was worried when some outlets were reporting (most notably RPS) that the army leveling wasn't as fun as we were led to believe. That was correct, unfortunately. The bonuses you get are small and incremental to the point that, by the time you see any real benefit, you'll likely have to be closing in on the max level. The model of small bonuses over a long period of time is ultimately self-defeating. Since by the time i get anything good I've long forgotten about the customization.

It would have been much more fun to get honorary bonuses like legionary standards or relics of slain heroes that your men bring with them on the battle map (like in med 2, remember the giant crosses Crusaders could get?). Sure it would only add a small benefit, but the awesome factor is through the roof in my opinion.

This is becoming long winded, so let me sum up a bit..

TL:DR - AKA - "MONK I AIN'T GONNA READ ALL THAT "

The game feels rushed as weird as that sounds. Half-baked ideas and unfinished graphics, AI and systems. Every criticism you've read leveled at the game is fair, and so too is most of the praise. As disappointed as I am there have been serious moments of fun in the time i've played the game! But if I had to put this on the scale of past releases, this is definitely a huge step back for CA. Shogun 2 was tremendous experience from start to finish, one I wrote numerous AARs for, but Rome 2? It just feels like it missed the mark.

It reached for the stars and fell short. In many ways, it's the same as Empire: Total War.

Shogun 2 is still the best unmodded experience you'll find in the 3D TW series imo. (for modded that goes to Medieval 2). If you're thinking about buying this and really want to try it some day, keep an eye on patch notes and wait for a sale. I'm not going to sit here and tell you that there's no fun to be had in Rome 2, because there most certainly is! But there's a lot of negatives.. some of which just don't make any logical sense as to how they got there.

Re: First Impressions

The game feels rushed as weird as that sounds. Half-baked ideas and unfinished graphics, AI and systems.

Saddest part is that their pandering banked. As far as they are concerned this is a success story. The demographics hardly care to learn :P
Will see if they'll put any effort in meaningful patches...

Shogun 2 is still the best unmodded experience you'll find in the 3D TW series imo.

Couldn't agree more: the legendary campaign is easily the best vanilla can offer in the whole TW serie. Only drawbacks for me are the limitation in time and space (obviously discounting RP depth, but hey that's what imagination is for :D)...